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本帖最后由 yping88 于 17-10-2018 13:38 编辑
It's not easy being white and privileged
By Richard Glover
Finally, this week, Senator Pauline Hanson put her parliamentary motion – "It's OK to be white". She even, for a time, had the support of the 23 Coalition members in the Senate.
It was a moment that allowed white people to express our bewildered pain; a moment to contemplate all we've been through. Many of us sat and wept. At long last, we'd been given a voice.
Senator Pauline Hanson has at last given unoppressed white people a voice.
Senator Pauline Hanson has at last given unoppressed white people a voice.CREDIT:ALEX ELLINGHAUSEN
As Senator Hanson talked about the long history of white oppression, fragments of memory crowded in.
There was the way my boater used to cut into my forehead on the way to private school. The way neighbouring kids would pretend to be friendly just so they could use our backyard pool. The dinner parties where my parents would force me to recite Banjo Paterson poems to their friends in the gap between entree and main course.
Oh Pauline, thank you for letting my story be told.
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I hear you say: "Was it really that bad, growing up white and privileged?" Let me give you two words: "tuna mornay".
We had to eat tuna mornay. All the time.
Not for us, the tasty multicultural meals eaten in other households, the aunties crowded around the stove, throwing in clumps of garlic, telling tales of the old country, the father decanting the red wine he'd made from the vines in the backyard, everyone laughing and joking before dancing around the backyard with arms around each other and bells on their shoes.
Not at our place.
For white folks, it was tuna mornay on a metal tray, eaten in front of the television, a clump of overcooked green beans if you were lucky. On Saturday night, it was incinerated lamb chops and brussels sprouts that had been cooked for three hours.
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Still not sympathetic? Let me move on to breakfast. Breakfast was taken at the breakfast bar. It was consumed with 2GB radio playing at high volume in the background.
Later, as a teenager, I had to help my father count and wrap the coins from our family business, a newsagent. On many a night, my hands were black from counting the family money. To get them clean, I had to really scrub at them, using a stiff little nail brush. Sometimes I feared I might develop dermatitis!
Not for us, the tasty multicultural meals eaten in other households.
Also: the small coins were really hard to roll.
It was tough for Dad, as well. He had to lift the heavy bags of coins into his car, which was an expensive sports car, so it hardly ever worked. On some occasions, he had to catch a taxi to the bank.
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Stories like this are part of the great silence; the white, middle-class pain that is never spoken about, never acknowledged.
Pauline, I realise, is speaking for all white people – both rich and poor. Yet it was worse if you were both white and wealthy.
In some middle-class households – right here on Sydney's North Shore – children as young as five were forced to eat Vogel's bread. Not the sliced stuff; this was the stuff sawn straight off the loaf.
At school, it would be a slice of Devon, served on Vogel, the poor rich white kid sitting alone on his bench, wishing his school was sufficiently multicultural to provide an ethnic kid with whom he could swap lunches.
A slice of lasagne? A couple of falafels? Really, we didn't ask for much. Most of the time: it was not to be.
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Later, we would go to university, and sit in classes entirely populated with students from entirely similar backgrounds. We'd find ourselves taking up weird hobbies – smoking French cigarettes! Wearing a strange little hat! Becoming a Stalinist! – just so we could differentiate ourselves from everyone else.
It's this daily grind of being white that takes its toll.
Just one Indigenous student, just one person from a Chinese background, and – just maybe – I wouldn't have had to smoke all those Gauloises cigarettes.
Later, after university, it would be employment, marriage and a family – all leading to a gnawing worry about the state of one's superannuation.
Because wealthy white people live much longer than other Australians – sometimes "the gap" is more than a decade – we are forced to build up our superannuation to a level that can cope with this additional longevity.
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It's this sort of hidden burden that Senator Hanson's motion so neatly captured.
As with so many instances of white oppression, at least we have a political system which understands our pain, which understands our struggle.
It's not only Senator Hanson. The whole Parliament has long realised there's a role for positive discrimination: rules designed to give "a hand up" to those who are doing it tough.
In our case: the negative gearing laws, the capital gains discount, the franking credit system, the family trust laws and the salary-sacrifice provisions within Australian superannuation.
Some say, "where's the fairness in a program that can only be accessed by one segment of society", but that's to ignore the special problems faced by people who are right here, living among you.
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Frankly, if you didn't grow up white and rich, it's hard to understand. You may have to check your lack of privilege.
Pauline understands. The government, at least for a time, seemed to understand. We thank them all for finally saying "Sorry".
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发表于 17-10-2018 12:30:29
楼主
发表于 17-10-2018 14:12:51
That IS her
